Charles Pierce skewers David Brooks’ recent column telling those damn kids to get off the lawn! which claims that a different “moral culture” has led to debt, which somehow is also related to out-of-wedlock births. Pierce:

Is there any doubt that, had David Brooks been writing for The New York Times in say, 1901, his columns would have been all about the quaint customs of those coal miners in Appalachia, and isn’t it clever how they drink their evening libations from mason jars, and aren’t they just the most religious of people, the way they all sing those lovely shape-note hymns when one of their men dies at 45 from black lung? We don’t want any onerous regulations stifling all of this, do we? Is there any doubt that he would be arguing that Morgan and Carnegie and the rest of them are the engines of our “young and vibrant” economy and that LaFollette and the rest of them are standing in the way of progress. Is there any doubt where he would have lined up after Homestead? The country needs fewer lectures from people who do not understand it.

We are not an undisciplined people. There are millions of us who go out, every damn day, filling out form after form after form, trying to find work. We are not lazy. We are not in need of “reform.” We are a country of hard-working people who cannot find jobs, not because they are unwilling to look, but because there are no jobs to be found, because the people whose balls David Brooks ceaselessly polishes stole all the money and wrecked the economy.

Then he gets mean. As the kids say, read the whole thing.